08 April 2019

Martin Howard Head of Customer Experience Arriva Rail North Ltd

Dear Martin

Arriva Rail North Limited (Trading as Northern)

Compliance with Condition 6 your Station Licence and GB Statement of National Regulatory Provisions: Passenger

As you will be aware, we were concerned about Northern’s failure to comply with Condition 6 (Complaints Handling) regarding the requirement to make a full response to 95% of complaints within 20 working days. In our correspondence we asked Northern to set out its plans to both meet and remain within the required timescales, and to provide weekly updates on performance until we were satisfied that these issues had been resolved.

In your responses you set out the measures Northern is taking to ensure that it meets its regulatory requirements. Our complaints monitoring indicates that Northern has now met and remains within the complaint handling response requirement. As a result, we are content to discontinue with the weekly reporting and return to the standard monthly monitoring arrangement. We are grateful to Northern for working cooperatively with us to resolve this matter and we are pleased it has led to a positive outcome for your passengers.

We are keen to continue the constructive dialogue we have developed with you throughout this process. Therefore it would be helpful if you could proactively alert us to any further problems of this nature which may arise in future. As with previous correspondence, we may publish this letter on our website.

Yours sincerely

Marcus Clements

CC. John Smith